I’m using a manually created colour ramp instead of a “standard” (i.e. ColorBrewer) diverging or sequential ramp, to emphasise the outliers (the big, expensive Band H houses and the small, cheap Band A ones) and try and reduce the “patchwork quilt” effect that you get when looking at such a map (which has nearly 170000 areas.) Another way to minimise this effect would have been to use larger geographies (LSOAs and MSOAs) at the smaller scales.

The map shows a swathe of light blue Band A housing across the north of England, and in Birmingham. In London, generally this doesn’t happen, and indeed a band of very large, expensive houses, protrudes from the affluant commuter belt right into the centre of London, from the south-west and north.

The map was created using UCL CASA’s MapTube, with a CSV file, descriptor file and stylesheet being the inputs. Welsh council tax bands use a different scale so are not included here. The Scotland/N.I. data is not available through the ONS website.

A gotcha when producing this map is that the file uses the new (2011) identifiers for OAs. Thankfully I found a file that maps the old to the new ones, although it took a bit of sleuthing to find it on the ONS website.